One of the problems politicians face is that voters often take you literally. If you are stupid enough to tell voters that you are going to create a million jobs by firing another 100,000 people who are working, you leave them struggling with the mathematics. The key to this is to explain the mathematics first.
We point this out as something of a public service for the million or so voters in Ontario who are impressed with Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s forcefulness. These folks were going to vote Conservative anyway but they like to mention Timmy’s forcefulness. And besides, he’s a family man and he represents all those family values that the good ole boys appreciate.
And besides, Timmy is going to get rid of all those damn windmills that are wasting our money trying to find a wind to generate some expensive electricity. Timmy is covering all the bases in this election. He and his friend Mayor Rob Ford are going to cancel all that fluffy light rail transit in the Toronto area and just build subways. They know that if they build them, the riders will come. And Timmy is not going to bother electrifying the GO trains as he is just going to run more trains, faster and give two-way service all day. This is despite the fact that the trains have to be electrified to run faster and provide better service—which is the entire point.
But we are still working on Timmy’s Three “R’s.” What is confusing people is that Timmy’s million jobs hardly add up. At this time, there are less than 600,000 people looking or interested in working in Ontario. Even if he could fire 100,000 civil servants, Timmy has a shortfall of at least 300,000 people to fill all his jobs.
But if Timmy fires the number of teachers he is promising, we are going to have some quite crowded classrooms. Timmy can solve both problems by allowing more child labour. Instead of bringing in foreign workers to do the dirty jobs, we can use school dropouts. With the new enlarged class sizes, nobody will notice that some of the kids are being left behind.
But we should bear in mind that Timmy will also be lowering the minimum wage. Most of us will need two jobs to make ends meet anyway.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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